Mornings on Horseback

by David McCullough

The mission of the Children’s Aid Society was to bring “moral disinfectants” to the festering “crime nests” of New York.

rectitudinous

Morally correct?

Number 6 West 57th Street.

Still there

There were lovely mornings on horseback, with Father leading the cavalcade, long sparkling afternoons on the water.

“I feel sorry for the country . . .” Theodore had told the boy in his last letter. “I fear for your future. We cannot stand so corrupt a government for any great length of time.”

So true

In Theodore’s time there was never any question as to the most popular man in the class. He was Robert Bacon, “the manly beauty,” captain of the football team, heavyweight boxing champion, winner in the hundred-yard dash and the quarter mile, number seven on the crew. The Class of 1880 was known then and later as Bacon’s class.

What effect on TR?

Theodore said later it was a combination of curiosity and “plain duty” that led him into politics, and that “I intended to be one of the governing class,” which may be taken as another way of saying he wanted power.

Father had died at forty-six; Mittie had been only forty-eight; Alice, all of twenty-two, her life barely begun. Nothing lasts. Winter waits.

GoT?

On the day Alice died, Theodore had made a large X on the page for February 14 in an otherwise empty diary for the year 1884, and beneath he wrote only, “The light has gone out of my life.”

He kept moving.

And when my heart’s dearest died, the light went out from my life for ever.

He called her “the Driving Wheel of Destiny and Superintendent-in-Chief of the Workings of Providence.”

Great title!

he was so alive at all points, and so gifted with the rare faculty of living intensely and entirely in every moment as it passed . . .